Getting Found Online – Episode 19 Transcript

Mark S. Hey everyone and welcome to the Episode 19 of the CAS Podcast, my name is Mark Stephenson.

Mark V. And I am Marc Vila and today we’re here to talk about local SEO, getting your business found online.

Mark S. Okay, so I want to say two things right up front. Just in case if this is the first time you’re listening and you’re not staring at the CAS podcast website itself. CAS stands for Custom Apparels Startups; so we do all this with an eye towards the bling business, the vinyl business, the custom embroidery business and the printed T-shirt business.

Mark V. Sure.

Mark S. So, that’s our perspective when we come to all of this, just so you know and the other thing that I want to mention is – most of the things that we talk about today 99% of them do not require you to have a website in order to participate in local SEO.

Mark V. And I have something to say.

Mark S. Go ahead!

Mark V. Okay, the coffee this morning is like rocket fuel here!

Mark S. Really? well hang on let’s pause this because now I need some.

Mark V. (Laughs)

Mark S. And SEO, for those of you folks that don’t know is Search Engine Optimization and it is all about getting your business found online, whether it’s a website or a Facebook page or just walking in through your front door.

Mark V. And it’s not just about finding your website or finding something like that, it’s not just about Google searching, but it’s about people going online and they don’t just go online on their computer, but they are doing it on the road, on their phone, parked in the parking lot trying to find something.

Mark S. Or on their tablet, sitting in the Starbucks. You know everybody is online all the time.

Mark V. Yeah and the hardest and most frustrating thing is I know there is a local embroidery shop a couple of miles away from where we are sitting right now and I’ve done it before where I have searched embroidery shop or embroidery company or embroidered T-shirts on my phone and the company that I know is right there but it doesn’t show up.

Mark S. You know what’s the shame about that Marc is… Can I call you Marc?

Mark V. Oh sure.

Mark S. Okay, what’s a shame about that Marc is that Google and Bing and any search engine you want to you use, they want to deliver you the best results that they can and they want to deliver it to you geographically. So right now I mean, most people are searching on their phones, when we look at our businesses and the analytics behind our website, it is a growing part of the market, people are going to their phones and they are talking to it or they are typing something in to find a location for something like Tampa custom T-shirts.

Mark V. Yeah, they are at a Starbucks or they are at a Panera Bread or something like that and they are sitting there and they are talking about their business and what they want to do. They say “you know what? For this new event we need T-shirts, hey Siri! Where can I get local T-shirts?” and you should be the number one answer especially if you are right there.

Mark S. You’ve got to do something to show-up though, it is not that eventually one day Google and Bing and all the other search engines might find you by-mistake but they are not going to associate your business with that little GPS satellite thing that’s in your phone or even when you’re home on your desktop computer and you’re using Google and you search, it asks you if it can use your location to give you better information and most people click “Yes”. So you need to be on the other end of that Yes.

Mark V. So, how do they start?

Mark S. There is two really basic ways and I think if you did these two things, you’d be ahead of 80-90% of the competition out there and this is true whether or not if you have a Website. So let’s talk about that for a second.

Mark V. Okay.

Mark S. You don’t need a website for the store. Let’s say you have a geographical location, you have a store front or you have a business that you want people to walk into, you have maybe a Facebook page that you want people to go to, you can go to Google my business and as a matter of fact you can Google “Google my business” right now and that is where Google will allow you to put in all the information about your business.

Mark V. So you can put in your whatever information you want, and this is true if you have a geographical storefront or you don’t.

Mark S. Or you don’t.

Mark V. You don’t have to put in your home address if you work from home. You could just not put the address part, you could leave the address vague, or you could put your P.O. Box…

Mark S. Or there is a box somewhere at the sign-up that say’s not a retail location.

Mark V. Yeah.

Mark S. Or you don’t have business hours. But just to let you know how easy it is to get started, because I know people are like “I am not comfortable online”, “I shop there but I really don’t know anything about websites”.

Mark V. I don’t one my information on the internet. (Example)

Mark S. Yeah that’s too bad. It’s already there, so get over that. So if you Google “Google my Business” and you click on the link there is a big blue button on the middle that say’s get on Google and that’s what you want to do.

Mark V. That’s where you start.

Mark S. Surprise! That’s where you start, and what this is going to do is just like a lot of places online and we’re going to talk about YouTube and Facebook and all that stuff but where ever you go online they give you a place to put in your address, put in your phone number, put in a website or an online link if you want to. Frequently there is a place to put in an E-mail address and a description of your business. And that description of your business, that paragraph about who you are and what you do is the key to getting found.

Mark V. So take time and thought into doing it, use a lot of words, describe in detail about what you do, this is if you’re going to sit down and spend 15 minutes (you don’t need that long)15-30 minutes tops if you really want to think about it, but if you’re going to spend some time doing anything for your business, you have to do that, think about it.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. And list everything you do.

Mark S. And Google for example, I can’t remember how many characters it is, but let’s say there is a two or three hundred word limit on what you can say about your business, I want you to go over that limit like nine times while you craft your message down to make sure that when somebody clicks… because what’ll happen when you’re done with this is, guess where you’re going to show up, you’re going to show up on Google maps and when you search for Tampa custom T-shirts or Huston Football Bling Designs or something like that, it’s going to show a map at the top of the page and it’s going to have those little buttons, what is it ? Is it ABC or is it…

Mark V. Yeah…

Mark S. It is ABC or 123 or something like that, that shows the location near you that fits that description.

Mark V. So when you’re writing that description there is one pro tip that I would give is think of every word that your customer would use to describe what you do. First, if you put yourself in your customer shoes, get a pen and paper or a notepad on your computer and think of what they might use, so if you are a rhinestone business, you might put “rhinestones” you might put “Bling” you might put..

Mark S. “Cheer mom T-shirts”.

Mark V. Cheer mom T-shirts, yeah exactly, you might put things like that, “dance shirts”, so, think of all the words that your customers would use to describe what you do and maybe rank them if there is a lot. And if you only got five or six you can probably fit them all but if you’ve got 25 start to rank them and then pick like your top 10 and those words have to go into description.

Mark S. And in the Biz those are called keywords.

Mark V. Keywords.

Mark S. So those are the keywords that people are going to type in to find your business, so let’s give some other examples because I think this is really important, if you are a screen printer then and you are in Clearwater, then you might want to have Clearwater Screen Printing Services, or you might want to have Screen-Printing, Custom Printed T-shirts Screen Printing, serving the Clearwater Tampa area. Whatever you want people to find, if you are a screen printer but you just do baseball stuff, then you don’t need to have screen printing in there, you can have custom baseball T-shirts.

Mark V. And you could also, if you’re at a loss for words… like “okay, alright, I wrote custom screen printing shirts, I got 10 words…” what are some things that you specialize in and you could also add in there. So if you specialize in doing… you can put youth sports, including baseball, soccer, little league, Pump Warner football, you can write some of these in there -Pump Warner Jerseys. So you can write those things in there, so fill it up, you’re not looking for everybody to find you, you’re looking for the people that want exactly what you do.

Mark S. Absolutely and if you have space leftover then what you want to do is add something about why you’re different, so maybe if part of your description is free shipping or local delivery… or it could be 24 hour turnaround time something once you have your description in there think about someone that is sitting around and driving on their phone and they are looking for your business and there are three business, that pop up within a 15 minute drive of them, why are they going to pick yours? Because yours is the one that says friendly service or yours the one that say’s quick turnaround time or yours is the one that says “family business”.

Mark V. No minimum order,

Mark S. No minimum order, it can be whatever a big advantage of doing business with you is.

Mark V. And that works, all of that works because, if you probably do it, you go on your phone and you search for a restaurant and you’re searching for a pizza place, you go on a phone and you do it and you choose to click the phone number because that’s what happens is, you go on your phone you ask Siri or Quortana or you type into Google or Bing on your phone a few results come up and you make a really quick choice, maybe four phone numbers come up, you’re going to click the phone number, you’re going to use your finger to push the phone number and dial one of those or go to the address, click on the address and go on to their location, why are they going to pick you, get the best customers for you to come by writing some good information in the description.

Mark S. Here are the important things, especially if you have any kind of retail business or a shop (if you don’t mind people showing up to your house) is to make sure you put in the address, make sure that you put in a business name and a phone number and your hours because not only is that correct address is what Google uses to find you, the hours are going to be important because it makes you look more like legitimate business, and the phone number is on there for obvious reasons.

Mark V. And Google and other search engines will say right under your phone number “Open now!” or “Closed now!”

Mark S. And it does, I am sitting here staring at my computer and you can do the same exercise, go to Google and I typed in Tampa custom T-shirts and what I got was, I got three ads which I am ignoring and again a map that I can click on has three highlighted businesses and a lot of smaller dots and then I’ve got the three top custom T-shirt businesses here in Tampa. Two of them say “open until five” and one of them says “open at 9am”. So I can look at the time and I can look at where I am and which one is close and I am going to go to one or I am going to call one. And the good news is, is that you’re going to write this description, you’re going to use these keywords, there are a lots of other places places that you’re going to do the same thing.

Mark V. So Google my business…

Mark S. That’s number one.

Mark V. Then Bing places.

Mark S. Google used to have a Google places and they kind of rolled it into Google my business to add maps, Bing is in kind of the places area but it is very similar. You can Google Bing places…

Mark V. A.. aou… That sounds dangerous.

Mark S. Which causes a glitch in the matrix, but you can definitely do that and it says Bing places for business. There is a picture of a very friendly looking young lady at a coffee shop with her tablet in hand and a button that says “Get Started”. Guess what you do there?

Mark V. Wait…

Mark S. No, you get started. And have you noticed so far we haven’t talked about anybody putting in a credit card number. These are all free, this is a free list.

Mark V. This is different than advertising.

Mark S. And by the way if you get that phone-call, someone has a slightly unusual accent and they call you and they say “Hi, I am an expert in SEO and Local SEO for 2000 or 1500 or 8000 dollars I can definitely get you to the number one search on Google for your business”. Don’t do that.

Mark V. Yeah, hang up.

Mark S. I mean people like say “No thanks, you’re a big fat liar and then hang-up”

Mark V. Now that we’ve learned that lesson, it is important, I get that phone-call a lot.

Mark S. I get it all the time, they sound like really nice people but they have a hard job.

Mark V. Okay, so then you mentioned in these listings and I’m going to talk about NAP.

Mark S. Naptime?

Mark V. Nap, yeah.

Mark S. Coz, I’ll take a nap right now.

Mark V. Yeah, naptime is name, address, phone – NAP.

Mark S. Okay, I get it.

Mark V. You need to have your NAP 100% the same, so right now decide what your NAP is and this is to the letter.

Mark S. Does the area code on your phone number have parenthesis around it or not? are you using dots or are you using dashes?

Mark V. Is it boulevard -Blvd or are you spelling the whole thing out. Is it Colman A-N-D Company; Colman + Company; Colman&Company. You need pick one of these and it needs to be the same across the board, you need to verify. As silly as this sounds, get on Google maps or something like that and make sure the spelling and spacing of your address is the way that it should be.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. Although that sounds silly,

Mark S. It makes a difference.

Mark V. it’s surprising how often that’s wrong.

Mark S. Plus there is that branding thing that Marketing guys like to talk about. I mean other than me! Marketing guys other than me like to talk about that. Someone has to be able to look at the words, even in your address, they have to be able to look at your company name and see the same thing everywhere they look.

Mark V. So if it is Joe’s Tees, is it Joes or is it Joe’s, you have to consider that.

Mark S. Is it “T’s” or is it “T”. I will tell you the one of the big keywords in our business is Custom T-shirts and there is about 47 different ways that you can write Custom T-shirts, depends on hyphens and letters or spaces and it is confusing.

Mark V. So you have to pick your NAP, you have to make sure that name, address and phone are correct, and then put it exactly the same in all of these places that you go.

Mark S. Right.

Mark V. So that’s your Facebook (if you have a Facebook page), on a Google my Business page, Bing Places on any type of community places where you can put up your business information. Make it the same everywhere and that consistency is for one going to make sure that it is accurate that when somebody clicks on the address or they touch it with a finger on the phone it actually shows up on a map.

Mark S. And you mentioned the Facebook word and I do want to make sure that we talk about that.

Mark V. Yeah.

Mark S. Because that is my No.3 on ways to get down on the line. Because if you Google “Bling transfers in the Tampa area” you will get somebody’s Facebook page. So even if you don’t have a website, Facebook for business pages are free and you have that same location with a little bit of that opportunity to put more text. So that is another place where you can put the description of your business the same way you did in Google and on Bing. And by the way, Bing and Yahoo – they share their information, so you’re covered. In Facebook there is a place to do that, there is a place for a separate website address if you have one, there is the same thing -you’ve got hours, you’ve got a place for a phone number, best way to contact, there is a host of information that you can find just by completely filling out your profile on Facebook for your business.

Mark V. So we’ve got that covered then. So if you’ve done those three things, even if you just the three, if you just do the Google the Bing and the Facebook, you’ve covered a huge portion of…

Mark S. You sound like my mom when you say “the Facebook” are you on the Facebook ? Yes we are.

Mark V. if you’ve covered all of those things then you’re going to be found by most everybody, but I still think that there are alternate ways that people can find you online.

Mark S. Okay, Hit me -Hit me tell me.

Mark V. Okay, if there is any type what you need to search for is if there is any community forums, local newspapers, chamber of commerce, city website pages, whatever it might be.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. Tourism pages, anything that is a community forum, a lot of these places want local businesses to fill out their information. It makes their website more legitimate and makes more people want to go there and if they go there they find information. So, is there a local tourism board or a chamber of commerce or does your city actually have a website and do they have business listing there, because that’s one that takes a little bit more work because for one you actually have to find the places, I think of TBO (Tampa Bay Online).

Mark S. Right.

Mark V. That’s something, they’ve got some cloudence and some presents in the Tampa Area, you could find business listings on there, but not everybody is there very few are there. However the few that are there are going to capture everybody that goes to that website.

Mark S. It’s even more valuable if one of those community forums is based on one of your niche markets, so let’s say that we are in Tempa, so the Lightning are a big deal here (That’s an ice hockey team) and there are several very well trafficked community forums where people talk about the players, the coaches and the last game, and they are on there constantly. That is another great place to list your business or even just participate.

Mark V. Yeah.

Mark S. And put your business name in the signature line.

Mark V. Yeah, absolutely. That’s actually a great idea if you have a website or just your business name and if you can participate on a forum and in your signature you can link your website.

Mark S. Yes.

Mark V. And you’re talking about how you are a huge lightening fan … then everybody that goes through, they’ll find you they’ll see you do. So those are some little hacks per say.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. But definitely find out your city pages and tourism pages.

Mark S. See that’s what we should call this Podcast Episode, it is Local hacks for SEO.

Mark V. Okay, then maybe we’ll change the name.

Mark S. We can’t now.

Mark V. Okay. (laughs)

Mark S. Okay, so you mentioned forums, how about reviews? Because when I type in…we have a local company here that does ProSpangle transfers and when I say a local company I mean a lady that has a ProSpangle machine and works in her garage, by the way those people can make a huge amount of money because it is a great business, when I type in “Tampa Bling Transfers” I get a Yelp review for that business and it is on the front page and I know for a fact that, she really doesn’t have a website and there is a small Facebook page but she doesn’t do any other marketing efforts at all… But everybody that looks for that particular keyword set and probably true for wherever you are, that Yelp review comes up and it is a good one! So even if I see somebody on the map (Google maps and bing) and I see a couple of paid advertisements and I see websites, if I see a review that’s already at five stars, that’s good stuff right there, you can get some real traffic from that review.

Mark V. Yeah, the review is a big deal and it is great favor to ask of your customers, “Oh my god she did such an awesome job, thanks you really saved me I was in a bind”. Whatever these people say about you because you’ve done a great job preparing custom apparel for them; Say you know what would really help me out? Do you think you could do like a Google review or Yelp review for me, it’s actually going to help my business out. A lot of them will say “Yes” and then that’s a great time where you can say, you can flip around your laptop.

Mark S. Yeah, here log right in… it depends on what kind of guy you are. That’s what I would do, as a matter of fact when I used to help out one of our local neighborhood organizations, I did a website forum and things like that when we would hold events at local restaurants, I would actually stand up and tell everyone in the room to take out their cell phones and if they are on Facebook to check in right now. And you can do the same with Yelp, you can do the same with Google+, doing Google reviews, you can ask your customers straight out of the game “Hey! Welcome to the shop, thanks for patronizing my business, do you mind, pulling out your Smartphone for a minute, going on Facebook and just hitting check in”.

Mark V. And if you have a little either coupon or a freebie that you can give away, that would be such a motivator, the best idea that I have seen (maybe not the best idea), my favorite idea.

Mark S. Okay.

Mark V. I went into a local phone shop where I was getting my battery replaced on my phone or something like that, and they had a little kiosk there, a little stand of some sort where they said “Hey, if you check in and give us a Google review, do it and ask the clerk for a free Screen protector.” And it was just a cheap plain screen protector… but I’ll tell you I sat there and I was waiting for my phone to be repaired, I sat there for half hour but I saw atleast six or seven people go off there and do it for something that’ll probably cost them a nickel.

Mark S. Yes, You’re into bribery though, you’re very much into bribery.

Mark V. I am into bribery, I think that it works, I think it is just a nice gesture.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. Hey, you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.

Mark S. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so we’ve talked about bribing people…

Mark V. Yeah.

Mark S. We’ve talked about reviews and Yelp, Yahoo and if for some reason you would benefit from a Travelocity review… or Trip adviser, that’s fine maybe you’ve got an amusement park in Custom T-shirt shop…

Mark V. That’s where I mentioned like the tourism a lot of our customers and people in this industry do cater towards tourism and if you do then yeah being on a travel website or being on a local tourism webpage…

Mark S. Man, that opens up a lot of opportunities…

Mark V. Yeah, come here and get custom stuff made.

Mark S. Or even if you just supply to area resorts, like we’ve got a lot of beach resorts here in the Tampa bay area, even if you are just one of their suppliers, you could go on there and say, hey! proud supplier of this spot.

Mark V. Absolutely, absolutely.

Mark S. You can definitely do that.

Mark V. So I think those are all really cool things to do and they are so easy, and then they are kind of you do it once.

Mark S. And once again they are all free.

Mark V. They are all free.

Mark S. Now there is one more that I want to mention here because it is kind of off the wall and i’ve used it for a couple of different companies and I just checked a few minutes ago and they still show up on the first page of search and that is going to manta.com. Manta used to be just, it’s a place where you would find things that were manufactured, I think that’s what it used to stand for is “Manufacturing Association for something”.

Mark V. Makes sense.

Mark S. But now you can just go on there and just get your business listed. And you can do the same things, you can fill in descriptions and things like that and they actually do show up on search. Now the downside to Manta is… I will warn you just like actually sign up for Google my Business is that you’ll start getting phone calls and E-mails from people who want to help you with the SEO and advertising. Don’t do any of it, don’t do anything anyone calls you or E-mails you or talks about, Except for us! But it’s a great source even a free listing on Manta you may never get a customer inquiry but you know it will help you with the SEO and it will help you show up.

Mark V. Yeah, that’s kind of the whole is just that, where ever people are going to be you just want to show up for your business, especially online because everything is online and if you do actually have a website, make sure that you follow some of these same rules on there that if you have somebody that helped to build your website for you, they hopefully if they are somebody good, they are preparing your website for local SEO.

Mark S. Yeah, absolutely.

Mark V. If it’s your cousin’s nephew who does websites.

Mark S. May not do that, may not be doing it.

Mark V. Sometimes it is worth to pay for some help.

Mark S. But it is a reputable company to partner with, like we partner with Deco Network company a lot at ColDesi and that’s part of their package is a little Local SEO to help you out.

Mark V. And one thing I mentioned on there and this is a good thing that, I didn’t mention for the description or wherever all of these things before this and your website is if you have a neighborhood name.

Mark S. Oh right, that was a good one.

Mark V. If you have a neighborhood name, so for a period of time I lived in Tampa for a long time for a period of that I lived in a area called Carolwood, which is in Tampa but it is a community in Tampa, it’s an area in Tampa and most big cities are going to have 5 or 10 or 20 little community or areas. So if you put that in your description and put it on your website, put it in the description on your Google and Bing all that stuff.

Mark S. Okay, wait… wait unless it is a terrible neighborhood, if you are working out of your home and you live in a terrible-terrible neighborhood that people don’t want to go to, then maybe just use a bigger one. If I was not in a nice part of Tampa and there was a Sub-neighborhood name then maybe I just want to say that I am in Tampa.

Mark V. Sure.

Mark S. Then people will be surprised when they come to your business and realize that they should’ve come not.

Mark V. Laughing.

Mark S. You know, could be something like that.

Mark V. All of that will…

Mark S. Carolwood is not like that, that’s not what reminded me, Carolwood is a nice respectable neighborhood.

Mark V. But if you do that, that will make a difference when people find you, because some folks will just search for the community, they’ll just put Carol-wood T-shirt shop

Mark V. Yeah and if you are near downtown that’s a great thing to describe, even if you are not in the direct area. Being in the vicinity is good enough too, so you could put near downtown if you’re three miles away and that’s fine if somebody is in the downtown area searching for something then three miles is reasonable.

Mark S. Right, that’s true.

Mark V. You have to be exactly in the area, if you are close enough use the one that is best to your advantage.

Mark S. Agreed that’s a good tip.

Mark V. I think that’s a nice way of saying that if you are in a bad neighborhood use a nice one.

Mark S. Yes, You use three miles from the rich neighborhood (that’s what you want to say). Okay I just remembered as we were talking and I don’t know why I didn’t make this one my top three or four and that’s YouTube. I know that a lot of you might not use it but if you search for almost anything especially if it starts with the words ‘how-to’ it is very likely that a YouTube video is going to present itself on the first page of search, if you didn’t know YouTube is a part of Google, it is owned by Google and it is I think, now it is Google Facebook, YouTube as far as the top three places where people search, so it is a great place to be found and not only is it a great place to be found but links from a YouTube channel or a YouTube video back to your website or back to your Facebook page will help your SEO as well, it will help your search rank.

Mark V. And if you are not going to get anything produced commercially or you don’t have a great idea for a video, you can even just put “How to order shirts in Tampa Florida through Tampa Custom T-shirts dot com (tempacustomtshirts.com) and then it could just be you or it doesn’t have to be your face if you are camera shy, you can do a screen-shot on your website” whatever it is, you can just talk about your business and be a very makeshift simple and very friendly business feeling..

Mark S. That’s what we do I think we’ve got 680 videos on the ColDesi website and we did them all either with my phone or a $400 video camera, it is not a big production. One of my favorite ideas is to maybe do a little video as you’re doing an order or when you’ve finished an order. Let’s say you get an order for a little league’s team’s caps.

Mark V. Okay.

Mark S. So, one of them is sowing on your machine and you pick up your phone and you point it at it, you hit the record button, say “Hey, so excited working on this order for the whatchamacallit local little league team” this is Mark from Mark’s custom T-shirts in Tampa Florida; Click! It is a thirty second video and if you make that available on YouTube and make sure that customer knows it’s there, they’ll share that thing, look! You can actually see them sowing the hats! Isn’t that cool? And it’ll get shared and you’ll get links it is a great technique.

Mark V. This just got juices flowing in my head about the customer experience episode that we did.

Mark S. Yeah, I know that, that’s a good one.

Mark V. I think that is a pretty cool idea for an added customer experience, what if you took a little shot of you making their apparel and put it on YouTube and share it to them as part of your routine customer experience. How many people do that?

Mark S. If you make it a video as opposed to a picture, if you take a picture then all of a sudden it’s like a car salesman that take a picture of you and your car. Nobody ever sees that, if you take a little video of the order being either Bling stone or you’re putting rhinestones on it or even if you’re just getting it packed up and ready to ship and how excited you are to have that customer to be putting together this order and how happy you are that they are going to order another one. if you do things like that make it a short video, that is a really powerful marketing tool when you put a link to your website on YouTube in there then it is great SEO too.

Mark V. Yeah, I don’t think this episode is terribly long or complicated.

Mark S. No. It’s good though.

Mark V. There is about five things that you need to do (I think total in this list ) and you can do them in a single afternoon, you could do them on a Saturday afternoon, it doesn’t take a lot of work, it takes a little bit of thought but the ramifications are huge and if you know all the shops in your area and you go online and try to find them, you’re going to see that still even in now a days they are not there.

Mark S. they’re not there, yeah.

Mark V. You want to be there right? I want you to be there.

Mark S. I know, because we need you to buy more equipment and more supplies to keep your business running.

Mark V. So we want you to be there, it’s going to help you out a ton it is going to be so easy and it doesn’t have to be terribly complicated and then I think there is this one more tip is that, when you are done go on your calendar, whether it is on your phone or your computer whatever you use even if you don’t normally use your phone calendar go in there and set a reminder for six months and then just check them all again.

Mark S. Yeah.

Mark V. make sure nothing is changed; make sure you don’t want to edit what it says.

Mark S. It’s not going to be a meeting, you’re not going to do this stuff and then show up everywhere 15 minutes later, so be patient, you need to do this stuff, it may not make an impact right now but it will soon.

Mark V. Absolutely, it will and if you’ll just keep on it, make sure you’re listing even just once a year even it is still up-to-date, if you say screen printing and embroidery and you stop doing screen printing and you’re focusing only on embroidery now, if you didn’t change any of those things you’re still going to get screen printing calls.

Mark S. Yes.

Mark V. And you don’t want that, it is going to be a waste of everyone’s time.

Mark S. Man… We should’ve called this podcast episode the secrets to getting found online.

Mark V. No, it’s too late we can’t do that now.

Mark S. I know, I know! Okay, so let’s run through our

Mark V. I can still change the name if I want.

Mark S. No, it’s too late, we can’t rerecord the opening and although nobody is listening at this point, it’s late in the podcast. Let’s do a quick recap here, we’ve talked about the number one thing that you can do if you are at home right now listening to this after the podcast, after you’ve gone to the podcast website page, you’ve made a nice comment about us, you joined custom Apparels startups Facebook group is to fill out Google my business. If you didn’t do anything else, you’ll be way ahead of the game just pretend that you got a phone-call that said, hey I’d like you to get you listed on Google, how would you like that? It is free, so just pretend that you got that phone-call.

So the next one is Bing places and Bing places will also get you listed on Yahoo because I do know personally that there are at-least three people that still use Yahoo.

Mark V. Yeah, I’ve seen them.

Mark S. Atleast three, then there is Facebook, we talked about YouTube, we talked about Yelp and Google reviews and we talked about Manta.com and we mentioned the forums -the local forums in getting listed… what else ?

The NAP, you had to talk about taking a nap.

Mark V. Yeah, we’ve got to make sure that your name address and phone number are the same and correct, exactly the same…

Mark S. I still haven’t done that, I still really need to do that.

Mark V. Exactly the same everywhere and then search around, ask around and find what all local community forums and listings that you can put your information on for free. So, I’ll name a few like a city website, a local tourism website, various chamber of commerce and there is not just one chamber of commerce in a lot of cities, you’ll find Hispanic chamber of commerce and you might as find all different sub-cultural chamber of commerce and you can probably get listed on all of those for free! because they want their members to find local businesses.

Mark S. Yes.

Mark V. Some of them you might have to join and we’ve talked about that in other episodes, maybe you do join some of those. But go through there and also the last little thing is if you do have a community area that you’re in that has a name or you’re near downtown or you are near a very big area make sure that you’re mentioning that as well.

Mark S. I agree especially if you are in a bad neighborhood. That’s the only thing I’ll say. Okay, I really like this podcast, I think it is very useful and it is something that’s not going to take a lot of time and down the road it is going to have a real impact on these folk’s business.

Mark V. Yeah, and the good news is any moment now we’re going to settle on what the name is going to be.

Mark S. You know, this has been episode 19 of the CAS Podcast, it’s been the Secrets of Getting Found Online for Free or something similar to that name, with Mark Stephenson from ColDesi.

Mark V. And I am Marc Vila from Colman and Company, thank you for listening.